Today's Edition
Juliet Macur (NYT)
Khalida Popal, the former captain of the Afghanistan women’s national football team, woke up in her apartment near Copenhagen, Denmark, drenched in sweat and shaking. She had collapsed and could not speak. An ambulance rushed to her.
It was two years ago last month, and the Taliban were taking control of Afghanistan. Female players on the national team that Popal helped create in 2007 were desperate to leave the country, fearing that the Taliban would kill them for playing the sport.
Players were deluging Popal with requests for help, and she felt smothered by guilt. For more than 15 years, much of that period spent in exile, she had encouraged Afghan girls to participate in sports, jobs and education.
The message was everything the Taliban despised. “I feel responsible for these girls,” Popal said later. “I’d rather die than turn my back on them.”
So that afternoon in 2021, she returned to her desk to help her compatriots. She helped rescue more than 200 people, including the senior national team. Now Popal is on another mission, one that reached its height at this summer’s Women’s World Cup. She is trying to persuade Fifa, the global governing body, to let players represent the country again after the Taliban barred women from playing sports.
The players, after escaping Afghanistan with Popal’s help, are living in Australia, which hosted this year’s World Cup with New Zealand. Fifa refuses to recognise it because the Afghanistan Football Federation claims it does not exist.
“These players dreamed of playing football for Afghanistan, and men just came and took that dream from them,” Popal said. “Fifa is saying, ‘We are sorry that you’ve lost your right to play football, girls, when you have done nothing to deserve it.’ It’s disgusting.”
In an emailed statement, Fifa said it cannot recognise a national team unless it is acknowledged by its national federation.
A spokesperson for AFF said the organisation could do nothing to help because the women’s national team dissolved when the players fled the country - an assertion the players reject.
Popal, 36, has been sharing the Afghan team’s story with everyone she can. More than 175,000 people have signed an online plea since late July.
More than 100 politicians endorsed a letter she wrote to Fifa with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who survived a Taliban attack when she was 15.
“Khalida is reminding the world that we are still here, don’t forget us,” said Fati Yousufi, the Afghan team’s captain and goalkeeper.
Anyone who wants to be like Popal should understand that her advocacy for the Afghan team has come with serious sacrifices. “It has taken a huge toll on her,” said Kelly Lindsey, an American whom Popal recruited to coach the Afghan national team in 2016. “But she won’t stop for a moment to take care of herself. Because if she did that, there would be no time for her to take care of others.”
Popal and her family were refugees in Pakistan, but when a US-led coalition drove out the Taliban in 2002, they returned to Kabul.
Her mother, Shokria Popal, helped recruit players, often contending with parents who called her a prostitute trying to destroy the culture.
From the Popals’ efforts, high school teams were born. Five years later, the Afghanistan Football Federation accepted Khalida’s team as the women’s national team. Popal recalled receiving death threats, including from one caller who said he would cut her to pieces.
In 2011, Popal complained on national television that the women’s team wasn’t getting enough support. She blamed corrupt sports officials for it.
Days later, she said, a truck rammed into the car and uniformed men fired shots. Then, when the Afghanistan Olympic committee’s headquarters were vandalized, Popal was blamed and a police warrant issued. Hours before the government barred her from traveling, she boarded a plane to India.
Popal was on the run. Multiple times, she changed her phone number and her hotel, but threats found their way to her.
The Women’s World Cup was ending in a day and Popal was eking out all the publicity she could get for the Afghan team before the world stopped watching. Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist, helped with that.
On a tiny indoor field, with about a dozen television cameras present, Popal listened as Yousafzai and Yousufi gave speeches. She took deep breaths and stared at the ground to fight back tears.
“It’s so lonely and tiring to do this on your own, which was what I did for a long time, but now I see that the new generation gets it,” she said, choking up. “It’s not all on my shoulders anymore.”
